The best idea ever, 2021

The best idea ever, 2021 

wood, ceramic, aluminum, wax, glass, prints, pigments 

The Installation consist of a mobile timber wall construction called Demonstrationswand from which the objects hang from or are embedded in. Other pieces of furniture and ceramic objects, such as The Barrel or Fried Egg Table, are set in relation to it and can get activated in Performances. You can find a lot of citations from artistic expressions of the twentieth century European modernism: The urgency of many avant-garde movements of this time were quite intriguing. Their ideas often aimed to no longer view life and art separately. That way the role of artist were actually valid and powerful in society and they were not just producers of luxury goods. The New, which would prevail through originality and fundamentally change society, played emerges between home objects, exhibition design, and lifestyles. The best Idea ever is a reflection on identity, positioning and heritage in which methods of appropriation often come into play. Their might be a hidden ironic commentary on being an artist in a time when the upper middle class is fed and the same time criticized within an Eurocentric tradition, which refuses to disclose colonial power structures as it continues to benefit from them. 

Photos: Leonard Prochazka 

Exhibited in Skulpturinstitut Wien // Diploma 2021

Ownership: Federal Ministry for Art and Culture Austria / Wien Museum since March 2022 

The Work won the Kunsthalle Prize 2021 and Recognition Award from the City of Vienna 

Demonstrative wall painting, 2021 // wood, stain, watercolors, chalk //270x182x104 

  

Figure with child, 2021 Ceramic (unglazed) // 60x26x30 

Androgynous lamp, 2021/ aluminum, tin, mirror, wax, pewter, steel /60x20x25 

Relief, 2021//Ceramic//60x70x2 

    The blue Tent, 2018 //Fabric //60x50x3m

    The Barrel, 2021// Ceramic // 70x60 

Excerpt of Text from Kathrin Heinrich written for EIKON-Magazine Issue #116 

She is often surprised that so many people have had her ideas before her, says Diana Barbosa Gil about the crux of contemporary art. Her way out is to flee forward, into the parodistic pastiche of quotations, into ironic exaggeration: Die beste Idee aller Zeiten (The Best Idea Ever) is the title of her diploma project, an installation that interweaves art historical references and her own earlier works. A large-format painting in ochre tones mounted on rollers and supplemented by sculptures refers, for example, to the modernist pictorial tradition of the Cubists, while the luminous Blaues Zelt (Blue Tent) next to it reflects both the concept of home itself and the personal context of the Colombian-born artist. (…) Whether sculpture, performance, or text, it is always the fundamental questions that drive Gil: What can art achieve in a capitalist society that trains it to be the tame diversion of the white middle classes and assimilates every critical moment from the outset? How can art be led out of its academic ivory tower and back into life, when the avant-garde has long been struggling with this endeavor? How can we create something new when everything has already been done? Other forms of publicity are needed, Gil argues in a video in which she gives a live tour of her exhibition Es wird immer Ärger 2.2 (It’s Getting Increasingly Worse 2.2) on Instagram—due to the corona lockdown, in her own living room. Her ambivalence toward the social medium is evident, as is her awareness of her role as an academically educated artist. Whether antiquity, the Middle Ages, or modernism and its relationship to colonialism—Diana Barbosa Gil describes her practice as “working through history.” In the process, it becomes a pointed commentary on the present.